Well, you post the pics but don't tell us whether you're content, what the challenges were when taking the pics, or if there is a special issue what you want us to comment on. Come on, give us some hints...
Another tip: If you place pictures that large, many people will not click through the link directly to flickr, where you can count the visitors and also have worldwide discussions of your pics. Or you link back from your flickr-pics with a link to the specific thread st CameraLabs like I do (see example http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomasrubach/498443956 ) so that people seeing your pics at flickr might move in to this forum.
As an aside: I'm not even sure whether you get a "hit" @flickr, when do deep-link to the static server and not to the so-called picture page (the one starting with http://www.flickr.com/photos/benmoscrop/Anybody out there who knows ------------------
Where are your EXIF data on Colour Mode and Lighting Type? Can it be that aperture cist much of the EXIF-data away?

Regarding my experience; I found that having a polarising filter was quite handy to help against the glass reflections. Definitely recommended for all those animals behind safety glass! The only other challenge was the tendency for matrix metering to over expose. For the most part I decided not to change the EV comp so I could judge how the camera performed throughout the day on Matrix. Other than the odd occasion when it would over expose quite a lot, it was fine. My favourite shot of the day was catching our friends kid in the ball pool. It's colourful and it just makes me smile when I see it.

Regarding the EXIF info; I'm using Aperture on the Mac and it's probably stripped some of the EXIF info out on export. Not all the EXIF tags are displayed in Aperture by default. I think if I added them then the tags would appear when I pull the images out - I'll need to play around with it. For your info though the colour mode was set to sRGB IIIa.

I'm not sure what you mean by lighting type. There's no setting for that anywhere in my D80. Do you mean light source? That denotes my manual WB setting which was set to fine weather.

Oh, forget the "lighting type", it was just an EXIF info adjacent to the "color mode". I'm using always Colour MODE1a which is factory default and gives a little less oomph colorwise.
Personally I would have prefered the kiddy-pic with 1a as there is enough color already - but this is personal taste. Otherwise I like this photo too, as the child looks quite natural, not "making the clown". Your friends will certainly love this one too.
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b.t.w.: as flickr does some resizing too, I'm never sure whether the pics are cropped by yourself or just downsized by flickr. When judging the quality of a pic this is important to know. So please give us some information on cropping/downsizing...

The first two are cropped a little but not by much, only to centre the subjects a bit more.

Personally, I prefer the IIIa colour mode as I find them more representative. I find it more effective to mute the colours in PP rather than boosting them if I want a muted look. Although since posting my last shots of the poppies I've set the saturation back to normal and am quite happy with this.

Looks like your actually in with the tiger, lol. I think if you were camera shake might be the bigger issue.

I think even VR might have struggled with that. It would make a good advertising campaign for Nikon though...

"VR. Combats camera shake in the midst of blind fear!!"

zorro wrote:

I'm very surprised at both of you guys choice in colourspace. Personally I only ever shoot in mode II, adobeRGB. You guys are strange

I actually haven't tried Adobe RGB at all. I know a lot of people take everything Ken Rockwell has to say as Gospel (a little too much sometimes), but he makes some convincing arguments against using Adobe RGB and how you can often get some screwy results when you send them off to be printed. Mainly because most of the people doing the printing don't know how to handle Adobe RGB. As a result, I've never bothered to try it.

That's actually not such a bad idea about the Nikon ad. We could pitch it.

Anyway. I don't really listen to Ken Rockwell all that much. AdobeRGB has the largest colour gamut so I tend to view this in the same way I view RAW. Get as much info in the shot as you can initially and then later in processing it can be adjusted or converted to suit the intended purpose. That's the way my head works anyway.

I need to read up on it a bit more but from what I gather, Adobe RGB is only useful if the software you're using to PP the images is aware of the Adobe RGB range, otherwise the colours don't get interpreted correctly.

That's true but software that doesn't support aRGB must be thin on the ground. Capture NX recognizes it. As far as I've read the problem comes with displaying on the web as not all browsers support aRGB. I'm not too sure about that part either but my images look ok here, using Firefox.

Judging from that, most browsers only support sRGB (although as you say, I'm not sure about that) and the other aspect to consider is the place you get your photos printed at (for me it's Photobox). If the printer is expecting an sRGB file and it receives an aRGB file, the colours will likely look washed out as they convert your image to sRGB for printing.

It's an interesting subject though - I hadn't even considered it. I think it's easy to get bogged down with technical info when in reality I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two in most situations.